What mistakes have TfL made over the past ten years?

The reason why this is a VERY interesting question is that some of the biggest mistakes over the years (not necessarily just the last 10), are mistakes because of things they HAVEN'T done.

It's easier to do nothing, and nobody ever lost their job for NOT spending money. It's easier to keep a low profile, then collect an index-linked pension for hiding behind a desk for 30 years, than to come up with an idea that might turn out to cost a bit of money, irrespective of the benefit to travellers

Part of the problem is "short term thinking". It's a curse.

The PPP was a massive faux pas and of course it is a little longer than 10 years ago. The partial privatisation of LU began in the 1980s with elements such as power generation & distribution, advertising and data networking being outsourced and LU staff being transferred under TUPE rules. The PPP was a variation on a theme and cemented the fragmentation of LUL into separate lines with differing ideas in each about the way to operate. The corporate image was a facade of unity covering the cracks in the multiplicity of departments and contractors involved in the planning, maintenance and operation of what once had been a well managed public service but which was ruined by politicians who starved it of funds and bad management in some areas as a result of the ridiculous way in which taxpayers money was allocated each year. Like many nationalised industries LU seemed to waste resources at times and the internal market made a mockery of realistic accounting and budgetting year in year out.
I have always felt that a better way than the PPP would've been for the board and senior management to stand up to the government as regards finance and to become more efficient at all levels of the business but my recollection is that the only person who could have achieved that and took his ideas to the government of the day was rejected out of hand because the politicians had already decided to wash their hands and get LUL off the visible treasury balance sheet. Passing LU to Ken Livingstone simply created a wedge between the operating department and much of the rest of the business and gave the media plenty to shout about whenever there was an engineering problem. It also gave the RMT a platform to villify its own members who were no longer 'in the fold' having been 'sold' to the highest bidder.
From 1992 to 2002 the system was run down wholesale in the reorganisation to lines and hundreds of staff were given severance before those left were transferred to Tube Lines and Metronet. Thousands of years of experience went with them, and in my opinion that set back LU engineering 10 years. The company has simply forgotten how to get work done safely and efficiently without endless disruption to services which once upon a time simply would not have been tolerated by senior management let alone the travelling public.
Now things appear to be completing the circle as engineering is being brought back in house to a large extent but in terms of operational efficiency LU is just a shadow of what LT Underground once was. It took over 100 years to build an efficient Underground network but it took less than 10 years to destroy it, only time will tell if it will be as good as it once was but it never will be as long as it is run as a business rather than a public service!

Stevo, I believe the answer is more complex than at first appears. When we re-nationalised the Executive in 1983, LTE was still a unified organisation very clearly led from the centre which imposed standards and formulated long term plans and despite Ken's dislike of LT management, that ethos had survived since it was first put under the GLC. The GLC itself had a very weak capability in the matter of transport operations and the development of public transport (effectively only two staff working on rail development, in fact). Splitting off the buses (as preparation to deregulation and selling off) and tubes into separate companies led to the central capability of LRT being run down dramatically. The assumption by Ridley, the then Secretary of State, was that development of the bus network would be a commercial thing as it was elsewhere, and that the tube could be left to maunder along with as little investment as possible; Ridley was very clear that with a declining population in London, there was no need for forward planning. LRT(A) was emphatically not to have a statutory duty to consider the future, unlike LT. Privatisation would have happened if the Prime Minister of the day hadn't set her face against rail privatisation generally. What then happened was really twenty lost years during which nothing of any great significance was done, apart from some inevitable rolling stock replacement. When control was given back to the GLA, there was no longer any "head" left from the former LTE, only its limbs, one of which had gone its own way in developing plans and the other of which had been sacrificed on the altar of PFI/PPP. The new TfL "head" has very wide responsibilities and its components (LU, London Buses, London Rail etc) work in silos. Corporate leadership comes from Finance, not planning and until Ken disappeared was characterised by an intense dislike of LU management, and a clear preference for London Rail and DLR (helped by the presence of smiler Ian Brown, the man we booted out of BR for losing 500 big ones on Frightliner).

Despite all this, LU began to pick up some of the forward looking threads in the '90s with the study of Hackney-Chelsea, and the possible extension of a tube line along the Lea Valley slow lines, only to be run over by the politicians yet again with transfer to the GLA. Had it persisted - to answer Stevo's original question - there is little doubt it would have begun to behave like BR did before it was broken up, formulating new technical initiatives and subject to the same financial disciplines - just as BR was about to come out of grant at the time of privatisation, so too would the tube eventually. The killer would have been if - as happened with the national rail network - an attempt had been made to write back all the capital value of the tubes into their books, despite the bizarre discussions that took place in 1983 to do just that. There would be no chance of ever servicing that cost, as there isn't with the rail network. In some ways, the tube PPP/PFI was an alternative approach to doing that.

Sorry if this is a bit lengthy as an answer...

GH

I wasn't aware that there was ever - in living memory - a declining population in London. I had thought only of a decline in the use of public transport due to unreliability and congestion. Ridley seemed totally unconcerned with London's public transport as he was giving his attention to the Miner's Strike and his Ridley Plan. It is hard to understand how anybody could believe that a rail network could possibly survive and fulfill its purpose without investment. Such short sightedness.
I believe that the first GLA administration made great advances with London's tube and rail whereas the subsequent administration has achieved little other than allowing ongoing projects to continue without too much interference
Thank you for your very useful and helpful answer grahamhewett

Stevo - between the Abercrombie Plan and about the late-70s, London's population fell from about 8.2m to about 6.9m (if I remember correctly) with the biggest losses in the inner boroughs such as Wandsworth, where I seem to recall the population fell by about 1/3). A lot of the earlier losses reflected the New Towns' creation and also the LCC's own decanting plans at Hook; later there were a number of initiatives to decentralise employment to places such as Basingstoke and Swindon.

wonderwaller - this is exactly also the problem we faced in the rail industry when the IMCOs had been sold to the likes of Balfours - the new management had no idea what they had bought and so stuck closely to the letter of any contract, not having the knowledge, experience or confidence to know any different. The previous managers had seen the writing on the wall and all taken early retirement, taking their accumulated knowledge with them.

That comment is spot on, it's exactly what I both saw and experienced although personally I was always motivated because I really enjoyed the many roles and projects that I undertook unlike a number of my former colleagues.

grahamhewett

Was there any reasoning behind Ken's dislike of LT/LU management?

I must say grahamhewett has taught me rather a lot on this thread and so I must express my heartfelt thanks to him although I am grateful to everyone who has contributed to this thread.
I think wonderwaller's comment about top heavy management applies to most public bodies. Jobs for the boys. Putting inexperienced people into senior positions simply because of who they know.
Whereas Ken's dislike of LT/LRT management was well known, I cannot help thinking that once the GLA came into being, Ken took a more active interest in London's transport as a whole than the current administration ever has.
My fear is that we are working towards a time when the only LUL employees left with be T/Ops and those working on or about the track. Station staff will be supplied by private companies as a more economic option.

It will be sooner than that. at a London Underground Society meeting a retired manager talked of leaving stations unmanned during operating hours and unlocked at night on the Northern line. my own experirnce on the District line was that they used to at least lock the station using the next one along the line. I seem to remember one Boxing Day one supervisor had the keys and drove along opening all the stations between Upminster Bridge and Upney.

Having read the preceding comments I do wonder if we are talking about the same organisation that I worked for for 26 years. There seems to be a great nostalgia for old world London Transport. That era died a long time ago because of wider trends that resulted in patronage loss, a decline in revenue and thus difficulties in justifying investment expenditure. People blame politicians for the damage to the organisation but transport in London has always had a political dimension - the extent has just varied over the decades. The same applies to the main line railways. A whole pile of factors, and not just the populist "PPP / PFI are evil" ones, contributed to changes to the London Transport organisation. London Underground had itself tried all sorts of management approaches with divisions, groups of lines, individual line and the service delivery unit concepts all happening during my time. Moving to individual line management with their own engineering resources created fifedoms and "competitive" approaches to the same problems rather than consistency. PPP can be criticised for all sorts of reasons but at least it reunited much, but not all, of the engineering resource.

If I go back to the question and what mistakes have TfL made then I would cite two or three major issues. I do, in part, agree with Graham Hewitt's observations about the effect of the late integration of LU into TfL. That has to be set in the context of the government deliberately holding on the LU until the PPP deals were executed. Ken Livingstone vehemently opposed the PPP and, by inference, the government and the LU management that he saw as "doing the government's bidding". We went through the infamous "dullard" episode where every manager in LU was tarred with the same brush. Obviously there were one or two "high profile casualties" when Ken eventually took over but the majority of people remained in post and suddenly were no longer "dullards". Perhaps I am too sensitive but I resented being called a "dullard" by a politician I had never met. TfL naturally enough adopted the negative view until such time as it got control of LU but it inherited a damaged and demotivated organisation partly resulting from its own (and the Mayor's actions). The main positive action after this time was recruiting Tim O'Toole as MD. He wasn't perfect, no one is, but IMO he was far and away the best MD I worked under. Unfortunately he went after about 6 years with his task incomplete.

The other mistake TfL made was not being sufficiently forceful about rationalising its organisation quickly to get rid of duplication. I'm not convinced it is as efficient and streamlined as it needs to be despite Horizon etc. Certainly the Tories on the Assembly are not convinced and I suspect that is also true of the other politicians. I fully support having a centralised transport organisation for a city like London but it does need, in these straitened times, to show that it as efficient and streamlined as possible. I see LU is increasing its headcount by another 250 people in the next year - this after culling people, myself included, after 3 successive years of reorganisation (guess what that did for morale). Where is the coherence and clear strategic direction? People might loathe the private sector approach of the old Tube Lines but when it reorganised itself (more than once) it did it within weeks and then concentrated on making the new structure. LU and TfL took months or even years to do the same thing with all the ensuing distraction that results from dragging such things out.

I would expect some people to consider TfL's stance of killing off the PPP and PFI to be popular. Strangly no one seems to have said so. No contractual arrangement is perfect but there does seem to be a failure to recognise that these deals did deliver substantial investment in a number of key asset areas. I doubt, given the way the political winds were blowing at the time, that LRT / LU would ever have been given the capital funding to deliver these projects themselves.

TfL has seemingly managed to get the Mayor (regardless of political persuasion) to acknowledge the need for the Tube to receive consistent investment and to get lines fully upgraded. We have to hope that that thinking is carried forward for the Piccadilly and Bakerloo lines and then the Central. It will be a key test of how TfL is viewed and if it is considered as a suitable organisation to be the steward of the Tube. Efficient, timely delivery of the Northern and Sub Surface upgrades will be the benchmark against which it is measured. I'm no longer an insider - I left a year ago having just had enough of being badly treated despite having been instrumental in delivering several big initiatives. I wish TfL well but it needs to sharpen its act some more to be able to survive the inevitable political attacks that I suspect are brewing right now. It also needs to be able to survive the inevitable departure of Sir Peter Hendy and the ensuing battle to replace him.

I am sure this only refers to open stations. Having said that the night supervisor has been only systemwide for the last 30 years. When the station inspector or foreman was late I've climbed over walls to get in because an emergency gate key was kept on the platform. Passengers such as postmen in the know have let me into stations. There were very few night supervisors on the District Line. Mile End had Station Masters but they all went home after the last train. Upney to Upminster Bridge was an exception because of the short gap between last and first train and BR had night staff when the Underground took over maanagement of the stations.